Irrawaddy river delta bears the brunt

Peninsula 5/7/2008

yangon • Most of the 22,000 cyclone victims in Myanmar were killed in the Irrawaddy river delta, a remote but densely populated region of malarial swampland that is hard to reach at the best of times. The city of Bogalay, in the heart of the delta, suffered the brunt of the storm’s fury with 10,000 people killed and 95 percent of homes there destroyed, the minister for social welfare Maung Maung Swe said yesterday.

The city sits amid the many streams at the mouth of the Irrawaddy, where it ends its 2,100km journey toward the Andaman Sea. Even before the storm, the six million people living in the impoverished delta had little access to clean drinking water, while suffering frequent outbreaks of malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases. Only one road links Bogalay to the main city and former capital of Yangon, but flood waters, fallen trees and other debris have rendered it all but impassable. International agencies, which are still waiting for visas to enter the country four days after the storm, said delivering aid to such a remote region would pose a major challenge.

“It’s low-lying, a lot of waterways. It is a swampy area that has been heavily used for agriculture,” said Richard Horsey, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Bangkok. “The roads are on embankments going between rice paddies. You have a heavy storm surge, or something like that, and the roads can be flooded out. So even in the best of times, it is a challenge to move,” he said.

The cyclone fuelled a 12-foot storm surge that caused most of the destruction in Bogalay, said Maung Maung Swe. Such high rising waters would easily have submerged most of the surrounding roads. Satellite images taken by NASA on Monday show the entire coastal plain under water, with agricultural areas of the delta — the country’s main rice-growing region — particularly hard hit by flooding. The images also showed Yangon, which sits on the delta’s southeastern edge, surrounded by flooding. The military limits access to much of the country, especially border regions plagued by decades of fighting with ethnic rebel insurgents.

The flooded delta region is part of Myanmar’s heartland, a region with few official restrictions on travel. But with few roads and scores of ships sunk or damaged by the storm, the logistics of getting around pose a major hurdle, even if foreign relief teams are allowed into Myanmar.

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